Berenson, Bernard,
né Bernhard Valvrojenski
[first name early appearing as Bernhard until 1914];
known to friends as "BB,"
"Doris" (code name by the firm of Duveen)

Date born: 1865

Place born: Butrimonys [Butrymanz] (Vilna), Lithuania

Date died: 1959

Place died: Settignano, Florence, Italy (Villa I Tatti)

Influential scholar of the Italian Renaissance employing
connoisseurship; consultant to the major American museums and
collectors in the early 20th century. Berenson was born to Albert
(originally Alter) Valvrojenski and Julia (originally Eudice) Mickleshanski (Valvrojenski). His father emigrated to
Boston from Lithuania with his family in 1875, changing their family name to "Berenson."
Bernard Berenson was educated at the
Latin School, Boston. A Jew by birth, he converted to Christianity and was
baptized in 1885. He attended Harvard University, where he
studied under Charles Eliot Norton, graduating with a B. A. in 1887. Berenson's classmates at Harvard
included the other future men of cultural importance, including the cultural philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952),
the art collector Charles A. Loeser (1864-1928) (both of whom Berenson tutored),
the philosopher William James (1842-1910). Through his connections with
Norton he met the Boston collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). Berenson used an initial trip to
Europe, financed by Mrs Gardner and others, to educate himself in literature (he
intended on becoming a novelist and critic). However his contact with
original works of art in Europe changed his mind resolving to someday live in Italy and be
a scholar of Italian art. He moved to Oxford, England, where he became part of the circle
of the collector esthete Edward Perry "Ned" Warren (1860-1928). At Oxford he encountered another
influential Renaissance scholar, Herbert Horne. Through Horne,
Berenson met the art historian Jean Paul Richter. Richter
urged Berenson to read the writings of Giovanni Morelli, who tremendously influenced Berenson's method. In 1889, he met the famous
connoisseur/art historian Giovanni Cavalcasselle and began publishing various studies on art,
using the connoisseurship approach to art based upon the writings of Morelli.
1890 was a watershed year for Berenson. He met Morelli personally (and the young art historian Adolfo Venturi, also present that day); in England he met a married woman, Mary Smith Costelloe, who subsequently left her husband and small children the following year to
follow Berenson; he also began dealing in art, scouting pictures for Richter,
the London dealer Otto Gutekunst (ca. 1865-after 1939) and Warren. Berenson acquired his first works as a dealer/facilitator
(Impressionist works and a Piero di Cosimo) for his
friend, the British collector James Burke, in 1892. His book Venetian Painters, largely a rewrite of Mary Berenson's
notes, appeared in 1894. The book, tracing the history of Venetian painting over
four centuries, became the first in a series of four studies on Italian schools (painting
styles). Berenson stated his method in an 1894 essay, "The Rudiments of Connoisseurship (A Fragment),"
which later appeared in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Second Series
of 1902. His brand of connoisseurship (so-called "scientific") was most clearly employed
with the then unknown
Venetian painter, Lorenzo Lotto, in Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism
(1894); it became Berenson's manifesto of Morellian analysis. Berenson was
purchasing for the American banker Theodore M. Davis as well as Mrs Gardner,
acquiring pictures for the latter based upon a percentage of the total cost.
The second of his Italian-school treatments, Florentine
Painters, appeared in 1896, a clearer treatise of author's theory of the painterly
analysis. Berenson used his critical eye to group paintings according to
how he considered the
artist handled, for example, surface texture (which Berenson called
"tactile imagination") or the weight and volume which the painted
figures seemed to possess. Berenson’s categorizing tendency
toward art history grew with the publication of Central Italian Painters
(1897), the third of his Italian schools-of-art books. Here artists were divided into rankings such as
"decorators" or "illustrators," or when these categories failed, the
artists were organized by those employing spatial techniques whose results
could, again according to Berenson, elicit specific "ideated" sensations
from the viewer. Berenson's books quickly found a wide readership,
providing him a steady, if modest, source of income. They rapidly became
the texts for the nascent art history courses being developed in American
universities. In 1900, Berenson bought a villa in the Tuscan hills of
Settignano, outside Florence. Villa I Tatti subsequently would be
forever associated with Berenson. The same year Mary Costelloe's husband died and
she married Berenson. The two transformed the eighteenth-century house and gardens into a
personal center for renaissance study. Berenson's library was famous and
his guests numerous. He remained there, except for periodic travel, the
rest of his life. At the villa he completed the first study of a school of
drawing by an art historian--Berenson's only catalog--Drawings of the
Florentine Painters (1903). A work of lasting importance, Drawings
was an illustrated catalog of known Florentine drawings and a separate
text describing and analyzing each artist using Berenson's critical method
and assumptions of personality. Berenson collected his articles into three
series each called, The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, a
compilation of early articles. The Berensons traveled to the United States in 1903 meeting the important American collectors, Henry Walters (1848-1931) in Baltimore, and Peter
Widener (1834/6-1915) and John Graver Johnson (1841-1917) in Philadelphia. Berenson's relationship
between dealer and advisor became ever more ambiguous during this time. Unbeknownst to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, he received over $3000 in a personal commission for
a sale of an El Greco he recommended to them in 1905; occasionally he assisted
in the smuggling of works to America. In 1906 Berenson hired Geoffrey Scott, a young
classics student from Oxford to be his secretary/librarian; his wife, Mary, fell deeply in
love with him. In retaliation to Mary for this affair, he started his own tryst with the librarian hired by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) for his collection, Belle
da Costa Greene (1883-1950). North Italian Painters of the
Renaissance, the final book of the quartet on Italian painters, appeared in 1907, in many ways his least successful book because these painters
resisted Berenson's stylistic analysis. Berenson, who had previously been taking
percentages from dealers for sales to those he advised, such as Isabella Stewart Gardner and others, first accepted a confidential retainer fee from Agnew
Galleries. That same year, 1907, after introducing Mrs Gardner to the aggressive
and unscrupulous art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869-1939), he sealed a secret deal with Duveen.
Though Berenson had advised Duveen since 1906, the new agreement cut him in an
unconventional 25 percent of the total Duveen sale. Duveen used Berenson's
authority to sell pictures to the wealthiest collectors in the United States
(and former Berenson confidents) Morgan and Joseph E. Widener (1871-1943). Berenson
published a volume
on Stefano di Giovanni Sassetta in 1909. He wrote the catalog of the
Widener's collections in 1913, which he himself helped assembled, and again for
Johnson in 1916. He was one of the original six contributors to the first
issue of Art in America in 1913, which Duveen bankrolled in order
to educate American collectors. Berenson published the first and second of his
four major works, Venetian Painting in America, and the third
series of The Study and Criticism of Italian Art in 1916. His war
duty for World War I consisted of translating and negotiating in Italy, duties
recommended by his friend, the author and art writer Edith Wharton. The third
book of his quartet, Essays in the Study of Sienese
Painting was published in 1918. An affair in Paris with Baroness Gabrielle La Caze, a French art collector, ensured. The following year, Berenson hired
Elisabetta "Nicky" Mariano (1887-1968) to be his librarian and secretary. In 1925 the young Japanese scholar of Botticelli, YukioYashiro began to assist Berenson with a new edition of
Drawings of the Florentine Painters. Berenson, apparently somewhat
prejudiced against Japanese fell out with Yashiro, replacing Yashiro with a
young Renaissance scholar from Oxford, Kenneth Clark, introduced Berenson
by then Keeper of the Art Department of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Charles F. Bell. Clark, still a student, assisted Berenson in the revision
the Florentine drawings book for over two
years. Berenson issued the final of his four
major publications, Studies in Medieval Painting, and a combined volume
of his regional Renaissance art books, Italian Painters of
the Renaissance, both in 1930. He severed his ties with Duveen permanently in 1937.
The art historian Fern Rusk Shapley assisted him at I Tatti with the
second edition of his Drawings of the Florentine Painters, published with
her own funds in 1938. As his wife's health declined, Mariano, became
Berenson's
lover as well. During World War II, he found himself a virtual
prisoner in I Tatti, despised as an American by the
Mussolini government, but admired by the locals and protected. Berenson and
Mariano hid at a friend's house, fearful his Jewish heritage would make him a
target. Mary Berenson died away from him at I Tatti in 1944. His war diary
was published in 1952 as Rumour and Reflection, 1941-1944 and the notes
on his reading for those years of enforced solitude as A Year's One Year's
Reading for Fun, 1942 (1960).
In 1948 Berenson wrote Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts which
expanded his concepts of "ideated sensations" and the notion of life-enhancing
qualities of art. He continued to consult for the dealer Georges Wildenstein. His postwar writing included articles to the Italian
newspaper Corriere della Sera. Berenson's final books included Alberto Sani (1950),
Caravaggio
(1953), and Piero della Francesca in 1954. Ever the conservative,
Berenson disapproved of modern art, viewing it as a decline of form. His
1954 The Arch of Constantine, or, The Decline of Form took the same
approach to the famous late classical monument. He died at Villa I Tatti
in 1959 and is interred with Mary at a chapel on the grounds of I Tatti. The actress
Marisa Berenson (b. 1946) is distantly related to Berenson (the daughter of his
second cousin, Robert). His brother-in-law was the philosopher Bertrand
Russell (1872-1970).

Berenson was the single-most influential art historian in the United States for most of the twentieth century. His writings were so famous that
his four major titles, Venetian Painting in America, The Study and
Criticism of Italian Art, Essays in the Study of Sienese
Painting, and Studies in Medieval Painting were referred to as the "four
gospels" by many English-speaking art historians. His connoisseurship-approach to art
history clarified and solidly attributed much of Italian Renaissance art
history, founded on the principles beginning with Karl Friedrich Rumohr through
Giovanni Cavalcaselle and ultimately to Morelli. Berenson's method was most clearly stated in his
1902 essay (though written in the 1890's), Rudiments of Connoisseurship. As an historian dedicated to the object (as opposed to
documentary art history, iconography, social art history, etc.), he centered the
emerging discipline. Berenson's approach focused on determining the authenticity of art works rather
than constructing histories in which art was created. His thrust proved
particularly useful to art dealers and collectors, with whom Berenson has been
criticized for having too close a relationship. Berenson's major books are
essentially lists of authenticated paintings by Berenson with introductory
essays. He never
altered the text in the numerous editions of his books, confident his analysis
was comprehensive, despite embarrassments such as his low assessment of Sassetta.
Instead, subsequent editions featured his corrections and
supplements to his lists of attributions.
Haughty and extremely class-conscious, perhaps because of his modest upbringings
and American heritage in a European-dominated field, Berenson cultivated feuds;
his personal correspondence shows that he viewed contemporary art historians as
either "friends" or "enemies." The opposing camps of the
traditional British art historians, led by S. Arthur Strong and R. Langton Douglas and the "Berenson-ites,"
manifested themselves in nasty reviews by one
another in the pages of the Burlington Magazine and elsewhere. Berenson had no students per se, but
mentored many scholars to various degrees, including the later director of the
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, John Walker and Harvard professor Sydney J. Freedberg, Clark (director of the National Gallery, London), and John Pope-Hennessey all of whom studied at I Tatti. I Tatti and its contents were
willed to Harvard University and are now the Biblioteca Berenson and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti.
His correspondence is housed at the Biblioteca Berenson.

Intellectually, Berenson considered artworks sufficient evidence from which to deduce a biography of the artist. This radical stance, that selfhood and morphology are one, what Gabriele Guercio called "a self within the process of signifcation."

Bibliography: all of Berenson's writing was done in English. A few pieces
appeared first in Italian translation. [bibliography to 1955:] Mostyn-Owen,
William, ed. Bibliografia di Bernard Berenson. Milan: Electa
editrice 1955; The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance. New York: G. P. Putnam,
1894; The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance. London: G. P. Putnam,
1897; The Study and Criticism of Italian Art. 2d series. London: George Bell,
1902 [containing the essay "Rudiments of Connoisseurship"]; The Drawings of Florentine Painters Classified, Criticised
and Studied as Documents in the History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art. 2
vols. New York: Dutton, 1903; North Italian Painters of the
Renaissance.New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907; Three Essays in Method.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1926; Studies in Medieval Painting. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1930; [first combined printing of all four texts] Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930; Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of Principal Artists and their
Works. Oxford University Press, 1932; Aesthetics and History. London: Pantheon, 1948; Caravaggio, his Incongruity and his Fame. London:
Chapman and Hall, 1953; The Arch of Constantine, or, The Decline of Form.
New York, Macmillan Co., 1954; One Year's Reading for Fun, 1942. New
York: Knopf, 1960.